Thirty years of Apatow's interviews with comedians — from a teenage Apatow with a tape recorder interviewing Carlin and Seinfeld, to career-peak conversations with Louis C.K., Lena Dunham, and others. A book about obsession, apprenticeship, and the specific compulsion that drives people to be funny for a living.
Judd Apatow started interviewing comedians when he was a teenager, tape recorder in hand, working for his high school radio station. He never stopped. Sick in the Head is thirty-plus years of those interviews collected into a single book, and reading it cover to cover is something closer to watching a specific subculture come into focus than reading a conventional book. The teenage-Apatow interviews with Carlin, Seinfeld, and Garry Shandling are in here. So are career-peak conversations with Louis C.K., Lena Dunham, Chris Rock, Sarah Silverman, Mel Brooks, and a dozen others. The range is the point.
What emerges across the interviews is a portrait of a specific kind of American working artist — obsessive, self-critical, generally unhappy in useful ways, willing to spend decades in a craft that might never make them rich or famous because the work itself is the only thing that makes sense. Apatow is the perfect interviewer for this material because he is one of them. He asks the questions that somebody outside comedy would not know to ask, and the answers he gets are denser, more specific, and more honest than the answers the same comedians give to magazine profilers.
I bring this book up when somebody's trying to understand the craft mentality — not just in comedy, but in any discipline where you have to put in a decade of unrewarded work before anyone notices. The shape of the working life is the same across the crafts, and Sick in the Head makes it legible. The endless obscurity. The specific kind of self-interrogation that sustains the work. The doubt. The way every comedian in the book describes some version of the same creative loneliness. You can translate all of that into river guiding, photography, writing, any craft that keeps you in the middle for long periods before anyone sees you.
The book is also just extremely funny in places. Apatow keeps in the passages where his interview subjects crack him up, and you can feel the two-professionals-riffing energy even in transcript. It's not a substitute for seeing these comedians perform, but it's the closest thing — you get the voice, the rhythm, the specific way each one builds an argument. If you're a fan of any of the working comedians in the collection, reading their interview is a minor gift.
Read it in pieces. Pick an interview. Read it at camp. Come back the next night for a different one. The book is designed to be read that way, and the cumulative picture that develops — of what a life in comedy actually is — is the book's real contribution, earned one interview at a time over the course of a month.
